Nevertheless I’m now just starting Season 6 and it still grabs my interest!
I’m glad I got some of you folks hooked – the original Perry Mason is a real classic!
One of my favourite characters besides Mason himself is the district attorney Hamilton Burger. He is sometimes excitable and is prone to sarcastic quips, which gets him censure from the judge. Unfortunately he doesn’t appear in all the episodes, but is in most of them. There’s a fairly long stretch without him in one of the later seasons where I thought he had left the series entirely, but he returned.
Perry Mason was one of the shows my sister and I watched long LONG ago. I’ve re-watched some of these old shows on YouTube six decades later and am almost always disappointed. My sister loved the quickly-canceled It’s a Man’s World so I clicked when I saw an episode on YouTube. My interest evaporated after a minute. TV then seems very amateurish by today’s standard. Two “success” stories: (1) We loved The Dick Van Dyke Show as kids; and I still find this light comedy to be fun. (2) Have Gun Will Travel was a good melodrama, and I still appreciate it … though not enough to keep watching episodes.
Recently I did watch a few episodes of Perry Mason. It was OK, but the characters are all much too bland for me – I’m jaded by “modern” series like Succession, The Wire, Lucifer.
I was surprised to see Perry Mason tear up his client’s incriminating taxi receipt in one of the early episodes. Is that proper ethics? The judge scolded Mason twice in the same episode for courtroom theatrics. The shenanigans reminded me of James Spader’s character in Boston Legal. (I can tolerate the bland Perry Mason better than Boston Spader with his continual childish antics.)
I wouldn’t use the word “bland”. I’d say the characters reflect the culture of a different era. Although the series spanned two decades, it essentially reflects the culture of the 1950s. There was certainly no attempt to be “edgy” like some modern series. Just good solid mystery stories, and always a surprise at the end.
My understanding is that Perry Mason was a lot more sleazy in the original Erle Stanley Gardner books than in the original TV series. But he still pushes the boundaries even in the TV show, and is sometimes guilty of unethical behaviour like temporarily witholding evidence. He also uses bluffs to trick a guilty party into confessing, pretending he has evidence that he really doesn’t.
Watched the first two episodes of a horror series called Below on Netflix. Pretty intriguing so far. It’s about a seaside community in Newfoundland that is terrorized by a giant squid (fairly minor spoiler, since that becomes obvious toward the end of ep.1).
Now, just based on that one sentence description it might sound kind of silly, but the setting is based on some historical facts-- for one, the Canadian government working to relocate remote communities to larger population centers since the mid 20th century is very real, and a major plot point. Also there’s a lot of science about how global warming is negatively affecting the Atlantic Ocean. The main character. played by Josh Hartnett, has a job I thought was made-up: he goes out in a boat, not to fish, but to harvest glacier fragments in the water to sell to a local vodka distillery. But I googled it, and that’s a real thing, apparently. Even the Newfoundland accents sound authentic, though I’m no expert.
In addition to the ‘creature feature’ aspect, there also seems to be a supernatural element, though the jury’s still out on that. One character sees an apparition that looks like Samara from The Ring, and others seem to be having wierd symptoms and hallucinations. But that might be explained by some sort of discharge the creature is giving off, that appears to be glacier ice, that the inhabitants of the town are inadvertently consuming, since all of their freshwater consumption seems to be in the form of glacier ice.
In short, if you like your horror served up with a large helping of authentic history and realistic-feeling rural settings, this show may be for you.
This show became available on Apple TV in the United States starting last week. Given that Ted Lasso’s fourth season just ended and Slow Horses’ sixth season is about to end, there’s not a lot of new stuff to watch there. So I appreciate having something new. (There is also a show called Brothers, with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, sort of playing themselves.)
Sharp Objects. Not very good at all. It is the perfect example of a feature length film crammed into a miniseries. Most charitably, it could have been paired down to, perhaps 5 episodes. Perhaps the best support for this contention is how sparse the “previously on” segments are throughout. It’s like “Okay, we get it, she had a shitty mother, her sister died, and she used to cut herself. Can we please have a plot now?” It seems that no, we cannot. Thumbs down, do not recommend.
For the benefit of those who’ve become hooked on the original Perry Mason series as I have, there’s a curious period when Raymond Burr (Perry Mason) is entirely absent for four consecutive episodes. It begins in season 6, episode 16, “The Case of Constant Doyle”, which bills “special guest star Bette Davis”. Little did I expect that Davis would play a lawyer and Mason would be nowhere in sight.
Turns out, according to Google AI, this was because in early 1963 Burr was recovering from surgery to remove intestinal polyps. Instead of postponing production, Burr was replaced in those episodes with prominent guest stars Bette Davis, Michael Rennie, Hugh O’Brian, and Walter Pidgeon. I didn’t think any of them were nearly as good as Burr himself in the role.
We watched NCIS last night and liked it. Michael Weatherly wasn’t as annoying as he used to be.
We’ll leave it in our rotation for now.
We also watched NCIS NY last night and pretty much liked it. Liked Scott Caan too. Will leave it in for now.
Wife actively disliked NCIS Origins and I didn’t care one way or the other, so it’s out.
We’ve been watching a series on Prime called Perception about a college professor with paranoid schizophrenia who consults for the FBI on difficult cases. It started out well but the writers made the main character too frenetic to be believable in the second season. My wife still likes it though so I’ll keep watching and see if they bring him back in line. Also LeVar Burton is in it and it’s fun to see him.
I tried watching old reruns of early NCIS but Tony’s constant sexual harassment of Sasha got old quickly.
Weatherly was making hints Abby might come back- she left and more of less did not get any serious work afterwards, except one season of a show canceled after one season. She says she is retired.
You mean the woman who said she was assaulted several times on set and was terrified of Mark Harmon? Weatherly was not without his own set of harassment scandals, if I recall correctly. I doubt she would come back to the show.
I’m thoroughly enjoying the US re-make of Doc Martin called Best Medicine. Josh Charles, Annie Potts, Abigail Spencer. It pretty closely follows the beats of Doc Martin, but with some differences. It’s not great TV, but I’m enjoying it.
But I also enjoy Curse of Oak Island, which is sooo dumb. So grain of salt, etc…
Mark’s dog bit a cast member was her reason. or that is the claim-
The two stars reportedly had a number of clashes behind the scenes in 2016 after the Gibbs actor brought his dog to set, where it bit a crew member leaving him needing 15 stitches. Tellingly, the pair did not share the screen together during Pauley’s emotional final episode. Instead, Abby bid farewell to her other colleagues at NCIS HQ and simply delivered a letter for Gibbs and watched from the street as he read it.
In the days following the episode’s broadcast, Pauley took to Twitter with a series of vague tweets which seemingly referenced the incident.
AFAIK she was not assaulted. She may have been scared of Harmon, he was pretty dominant on the shao, with his dog, etc.
I’m quite surprised there’s not a long running thread on it on the dope. Charting the rise and fall of the seasons might be interesting.
Of course Season 15 was the worst, but by any normal sitcom measure, its probably still an ok Season. Ireland bit ruined it for sure, but it did give us Lethal Weapon 7, which is always a good thing. And the monkey one (liked the reference of the disturbance of that haunting them in the current season).
This season? Charlies idiot savancy (is that a word?) is always fun, and Dee and Dennis just getting into drugs when they go back to college was fun. I did enjoy the renaissance faire episode (the dragon!), though the joust thing didn’t make sense, but I always love the MacPoyles at any time. Gilligans Island one is another of those US based ones (like the Liberty Bell, Superbowl) which the rest of the world just doesn’t really get, but hey, that’s fine. Rest were ok, but yeah, the last two were actively good. I think I thought last Seasons was more of a return to form, apart from the Bachelor thing, but nice to have a chance to see Frank do a standalone episode. More Dee, that’s what I want. Just the moment she gets told the beer she’s drinking was non alcoholic and how insane she goes, is just excellent.